Jasper I hadn’t shifted in eleven days. Not for lack of trying. Every morning I went to the tree line at the eastern edge of the pack house grounds, stripped off my shirt in the early heat, and stood in the shadow of the pines waiting for my wolf to come. Every morning he refused. Not with the clean resistance of a wolf choosing stillness — with the jagged, painful half-refusal of something broken, a mechanism that wanted to function and couldn’t find the way. On the third day I had managed a partial shift that left me on my knees in the dirt for twenty minutes afterward, my hands wrong, my spine screaming, my wolf retreating back behind whatever wall he’d built and refusing to come out again. On the seventh day I hadn’t tried. I’d just stood there in the trees and listened to him howl. Not out loud. The howling was internal, which was somehow worse — a sound that filled my skull and had nowhere to go, that Scarlet could apparently sense in the small hours, lying beside me, becau
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